DANCE REVIEW : L.A. Chamber Ballet at Japan America

“Sleepwalk” is the title of a dance suite by Raiford Rogers that Los Angeles Chamber Ballet introduced Friday on a four-part program at the Japan America Theatre. The term also might describe the artistic stance of this company and so much of American ballet recently: absorbed in dreams of the past and rootless creative wandering.

Rogers’ new ballet embraces these qualities as seven attractive, accomplished dancers drift through choreography set to three recorded opera arias. The monochromatic backdrop by painter Mark Stock shows a woman in a sleeping mask, with the dancers presumably figures in her dream.

The first section (to Bellini) features lush, generalized swooping, but the more dramatic central episode (to Verdi) finds Rogers developing intriguing formal relationships between soloists and groups. The finale (to Dvorak) exploits partnerships--including one between the company’s most classically gifted artists, Tzer-Shing Wang and Daniel Kirk.

Though he misses the irony of Stock’s painting, Rogers proves consistently musical and even sensitive. Still, “Sleepwalk” goes nowhere--it merely explores a hermetic style, touching on human feeling almost by accident. Janet Eilber’s new “Just So” proves equally self-absorbed as it uses mime and character dance to retell a Kipling fable as recorded by Bobby McFerrin and Jack Nicholson.

The piece starts strongly with a zoological romp to McFerrin’s playful variations on the title. But then the storytelling starts and no sustained dancing opportunities ever occur again--just whimsical kiddie-ballet show and tell. Curious that a company that found specific contemporary implications in the Orpheus myth would settle for such an easy, head-in-the-sand success here.

Laurence Blake’s new “Tunnel” boasts a varied, intense score by Eric Ruskin and clever staging tricks that camouflage the lack of choreographic development. Using John Funk as lead dancer, it revels in behavioral eccentricities and extreme contrasts in dynamics.

Early on, you see it as a character study of someone suffering an emotional breakdown. But then a flashy pas de deux comes from nowhere and next a series of showpiece solos--just a pileup of effects unified by Funk’s role and those metal towers designed by Liz Stillwell that keep sinking into view.

All 10 dancers wear some version of white kilts-over-knickers: unusual, revealing and ultimately pointless, just like the work itself.

Completing the program: Mary Jane Eisenberg’s haunting “Group Portrait: The Satoh Piece,” a revival from 1987 in which the varied sculptural poses assigned to the seven-member cast appear less the focus than the dancers’ suppressed emotions. The key, in other words, lies between the steps, with the result something like watching a friend or co-worker execute a familiar task with an unacknowledged emotional burden you’ve never seen before.

Kirk and Nicole Silicato looked especially fine here, but right now expertise isn’t the problem at Los Angeles Chamber Ballet so much as a stubbornly ingrown perspective that estranges the company from both its most daring past achievements and from the cultural life of this city. It’s hard to remember an evening when the company danced better--or mattered less.